Objection 1: It seems that artificially cloned human beings possess no soul. St. Thomas Aquinas says in his Commentary of Aristotle’s De Anima that the soul is, by definition, immaterial — “a thing is free from the restriction of matter and has a certain width and infinity.” The process of cloning is a biotechnological technique that produces an exact genetic copy of a cell or an organism. But in cloning a human being, only a human material body is produced. Therefore, the immaterial soul in a human being cannot be cloned or produced and a cloned human being would not have a soul.
Objection 2: Further, the process of human cloning bypasses the sexual act and, unlike other assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), it also bypasses the need for sexual gametes, egg and sperm. In fact, men are no longer needed at all — cloned cells and cloned organisms are created asexually. But according to the Christian theological view of Traducianism (sometimes called “Generationism”), initially developed by Tertullian and somewhat propagated by St. Augustine of Hippo, human beings derive both their bodies and souls from their parents through procreation. Therefore, artificially cloned human beings cannot possess a soul because there are no parents, no sexual act, and no procreation involved.
On the contrary, God said in the Book of Genesis, “Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)
I answer that, in the Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Aquinas says, “By ‘soul’ we understand that by which a living thing is alive.” The soul, therefore, is considered as the principle of all life. A cloned human being — inasmuch as it is alive, that is, it shows signs of appetite, sentience and rationality — does indeed possess a soul that animates it, distinguishing the living clone from a mere inanimate corpse.
Reply to Objection 1: In religious doctrines, “ensoulment” is the moment at which a human being receives a soul. During the time of Aristotle, it was commonly accepted that the human soul would enter the forming body at the age of 40 days old (male embryos) or 90 days (female embryos). When there was a quickening in the child’s development then it was considered an indication of the presence of a soul. Christian doctrine believes that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception. Tertullian affirms this when he said: “the one who will be a man is one already,” (Apologeticum IX, 8) and was reaffirmed more recently by Pope Benedict XVI when he said; “there is no reason not to consider him [the child in the womb] a person from conception.”Although the process of cloning cannot produce an immaterial soul along with the material body, it is the external process of ensoulment that can provide a soul to a developing cloned body. Therefore a cloned human can have an immaterial soul not produced artificially but imbued by a divine being like God.
Reply to Objection 2: Traducianism — the belief that a human soul is not uniquely created but inherited from both parents upon conception — is no longer a tenable position. One doesn’t need to speculate about the possibility of human cloning when human cloning already exists — in the case of identical (mono-zygotic) twins. In a natural process, a single conceived zygote splits into two or more separate and complete embryos. This does not mean there are two or more conceptions. And no Traducian would admit that these identical twins or triplets have only one soul shared between them. If this is indeed comparable to clones, then the theory of Traducianism is questionable. Traducianism implies that God only ever created one soul (Adam) and every other soul from then on was received from their parents. Christians today commonly accept the doctrine of “Soul Creationism” in which God creates every single unique soul at the moment of conception. The Creationist view can easily accept the possibility that clones have souls, directly created by God at the appropriate time.
